Six months. Six months of careful emails, weekly phone calls, and the slow rebuilding of something that might eventually become trust. Six months of proving to Indira—and to myself—that the changes I’d made weren’t temporary or superficial.
The phone calls had become the highlight of my weeks. Every Sunday at seven, her number would appear on my screen, and for an hour we’d talk about everything and nothing. Books, movies, the weather. Safe topics that slowly became less safe as we learned to trust each other again.
Vaughn. She’d mentioned him before—the safe, steady guy she’d been seeing. A musician who watched documentaries about sustainable farming. He sounded like a good man, the kind of man who’d never hurt her.
“We’re keeping things casual,” she said now. “I’m not ready for anything serious with anyone right now.”
I didn’t ask if that meant she was thinking about me differently. I just filed the information away and kept being patient.
But after we hung up, alone in my office with the whiskey I still hadn’t touched, the patience cracked.
Vaughn. Some asshole musician with his fucking sustainable farming documentaries was touching Indira. Kissing her. Maybe more. The image hit me like a freight train—her in bed with someone else, her making those sounds I used to draw out of her, her looking at some other man the way she used to look at me.
The whiskey glass shattered in my hand before I realized I’d squeezed. Amber liquid and blood dripped onto my desk, and I didn’t feel the cuts. All I felt was Vaughn’s hands on her skin, her breath catching the way it used to for me.
I wanted to kill him. The thought was instant and visceral. My jaw ached from clenching it hard enough to crack teeth. My hands, the one still bleeding, the one balled into a fist, wanted to break something. Someone. I could find out where this guy lived, show up at his door, make it very clear that Indira was—
Was what? Mine?
She wasn’t mine. I’d made sure of that when I fucked Crystal on my desk while Indira was away.
I unclenched my fists, one finger at a time. Picked a shard of glass from my palm. The sting helped, something small and manageable to focus on while the bigger pain burned through me. Was this how Indira had felt when she walked in on me and Crystal? This sick, burning rage? This desperate need to hurt someone?
No. I realized it almost immediately. What she’d felt was worse. Way worse.
She hadn’t just imagined me with someone else—she’d seen it. Walked through the door expecting to surprise the man she loved and found him balls-deep in another woman. She’d heard the sounds, smelled the sex, watched my face shift from pleasure to annoyance like she was interrupting something inconvenient.
We’d been together. She’d had every right to expect fidelity. Every right to believe she was the only one.
I was just sitting here torturing myself with mental images of a woman I’d driven away months ago, a woman who owed me nothing, who had every right to fuck whoever she wanted. We weren’t together. I hadn’t walked in on anything. I was just thinking about it, and even that was enough to make me want to put my fist through a wall.
Indira had lived through the real thing. Had packed her bags with that image burned into her memory. Had rebuilt her entire life carrying that weight.
The rage drained out of me like blood from a wound. My shoulders dropped. The muscles in my neck, coiled tight enough to snap, slowly released. I sat back in my chair and stared at the ceiling, suddenly exhausted—and ashamed.
Good for her.
The thought surprised me, but I meant it. She was out there living her life, dating, experiencing things. She wasn’t sitting around pining for the man who’d betrayed her. She wasn’t letting what I’d done turn her into someone bitter or closed off.
I was glad I hadn’t broken her. Glad she was still strong enough to be out there, still looking for her happy ending—in every sense of the word.
Then I laughed—actually laughed out loud in my empty office. Because that’s exactly what I’d become. She left, and I’d been celibate ever since. Months of turning down club girls, of sleeping alone, of learning who I was without conquest. Meanwhile, Indira was out there living her best life, dating musicians, going on dinner dates, being the queen she’d always been.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
She’d walked away from the man who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, and that man had become a monk. She’d left a cheater and somehow she was the one still enjoying life while I sat here like a jealous teenager imagining her with someone else.
If that wasn’t karma, I didn’t know what was.
Now, the hardest part wasn’t the waiting to hear from her—it was maintaining that patience while running an MC full of men who thought I’d lost my mind.
“Church is in session,” I announced, banging the gavel against the scarred wooden table. Around me sat my officers and senior members, men who’d watched me transform from a pussy-chasing president into something they weren’t sure they recognized.
“First order of business,” Holden said, consulting his notes. “Territory expansion. We’ve been looking at Louisville for months. Time to shit or get off the pot.”
“Demographics look good,” Glitch added, pulling up maps on his laptop. “Rural enough for privacy, good highway access, minimal law enforcement presence. Perfect for our operations.”
I studied the projected territory on Glitch’s screen. It was prime real estate for gun running and money laundering. The kind of expansion that could increase our revenue by thirty percent within the first year.
